For the last few years, the state of ARM CPUs has been firmly planted in the world of ARMv7 instructions. These chips, the Cortex A5, A7, A9, A15, and A17 are divided into ‘good, better, best’ segments, with the A7 pulling its weight as the processor in the Raspberry Pi 2, and a dual-core A15 finding its way into the latest BeagleBoard. While these CPUs are very capable, they don’t support the latest ARM architecture, ARMv8. For the last few years, the only ARM processors with the v8 architecture fell into the ‘better’ and ‘best’ segments. Although the A53, A57, and A72 chips are very capable, there hasn’t been a low power ARMv8 chip until this announcement.

So what does this announcement mean for the next generation of the Internet of Things, single board computers, and the wearable electronics of tomorrow? Absolutely nothing. Only the processor IP was released, and it will take at least a year for this core to make it into a chip. It will be 18 to 24 months until you can find this core in a consumer device. On the other hand, when these devices do appear, they will be significantly faster than current devices with a Cortex A5 and A7.